Within a communication system, a network bandwidth plays an important role during the transmission of multimedia signals. Various multimedia services, such as, broadcasting services, video on demand services, video conferencing and/or the like generate the multimedia signals. Generally, the multimedia signal is of extremely large bandwidth and occupies substantial portion of the network bandwidth. Accordingly, various compression standards, such as, Moving Picture Expert Groups (e.g., MPEG-1, MPEG-2), H.26X and/or the like are developed in order to remove data redundancy in the multimedia signal. Various compression techniques, as defined in the compression standards, are employed to generate a compressed multimedia signal. The compressed multimedia signal relatively occupies lesser network bandwidth. Also, the compressed multimedia signal generally includes coded frames, such as, coded picture frames, coded audio frames, coded data frames and/or the like.
Various digital systems have been developed for processing (e.g., broadcasting, splicing and the like) the compressed multimedia signal. On one side, compression techniques reduce the bandwidth requirements of the multimedia signal, whereas, on other side, compression techniques have inadvertently increased the complexity of the digital systems. For example, in a typical splicing operation, the digital system is configured to first decode the compressed multimedia signal and then replace at least one or more frames (e.g., picture frames) of the decoded multimedia signal with the other frames. Further, on completion of the splicing operation, the digital system is configured to re-encode the decoded multimedia signal using the aforementioned compression standards. Such decoding and re-encoding of the multimedia signal affects the quality of the compressed multimedia signal and decreases the efficiency of the digital systems. Also, the digital system requires high end processing units having large computational power to process the compressed multimedia signal.
Furthermore, during the splicing operation, various streams such as, video streams, audio streams and/or the like of the multimedia signal may lose timing synchronization among each other. In a conventional method, the digital system uses a hardware clock as a slave clock to one or more stream clocks to achieve timing synchronization among the one or more streams. The hardware clock adds additional complexity to the digital system.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for efficiently splicing the compressed multimedia signal.